Top Ten Signs Solar Energy is rapidly Winning

The recent UN report on climate change points out that the world does not have much time to switch to renewables if it is to avoid catastrophes stemming from global warming. Climate change is being driven by human beings burning coal, gas and petroleum, and we need to stop doing that ASAP. The most plausible path to green energy is solar panels, which are rapidly falling in price and rising in efficiency. (A German team recently achieved 44.7% efficiency, more than doubling the typical yield per panel nowadays.) My guess is that no one will bother with hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of natural gas in only a few years because solar panels will be much cheaper. Propagandists will try to convince you that solar is not important (because it is only recently growing by leaps and bounds and so is still a small part of the world’s energy mix). But that would be like complaining in April of 2010 that there weren’t many iPad tablets in consumers’ hands compared to laptop computers. The iPad was only introduced at the beginning of that month. Over three years later the world is flooded with them. Solar panels will be far more popular than iPads over time.

The sheer scale of the building out of solar capacity in various parts of the world now is mind-boggling. Here are ten items that give a sense of that scale:

1. Worldwide in 2013, it is expected that 33 gigawatts of wind power will be added But as much as 38 gigawatts of solar could be added, so that solar is beginning to outstrip wind. Since there is far more energy available from the sun than there is wind energy, this surge of solar is good news for renewables. The world uses roughly 15,000 gigawatts of energy, so we need to vastly expand the number and rate of solar installations, but their present growth is eye-popping compared to just a few years ago.

2. The price of solar panels in the US fell by 60% from January 2011 until June of 2013. Some observers suggest that we are seeing a Moore’s law for solar panels, by analogy to the principle in computer processing that data density doubles every 18 months. The efficiency of the panels in labs has begun doubling every 2.5 years, and the cost is likewise falling rapidly.

7. The Japanese space agency, JAXA, is planning to put up stationary satellites to collect sunlight and then beam energy down to collectors via lasers or microwaves. Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster has idled most of its nuclear plants, and though the present government wants to reopen some of them, Japanese public opinion is now suspicious of nuclear power. New technological solution to green energy will likely be a hallmark of Japanese research and development in the coming years, and could well help reinvigorate the Japanese economy.